Hermione Granger's Emotionally Disturbed Rationality
by Stanrick
Summary: These are the personal accounts of one Hermione J. Granger. It's not a diary. She doesn't like diaries. She writes commentaries and factual reports and collects them in leather-bound books, of which she has completed twelve volumes over the course of eight years so far. This is her fifth year at Hogwarts, and chances are she won't manage to finish it before going utterly insane.
1. Preface

**Disclaimer:** I ain't claimin' nuthin', nuh-uh!

**Introduction: **I'm feeling _experimental_. Ladies? Anyone? No? Okay. So, I'm not only writing the fictitious non-diary of a girl – which, I reckon, is quite experimental enough on its own account –, but I'm also uploading it after having written no more than what you will be able to read here. I literally just drummed this into my keyboard last night while watching a game of hoops (is there anyone outside Miami who likes the Heat?), and while I have a multitude of incoherent ideas about where I _could_ see this going, I wouldn't exactly claim that I have much of a concrete plan. But in this case, that's precisely how it's meant to be.

And so, for the very first time, I'm sharing a story (or rather: the possibility of a story) with you guys out there before I have finished it. I don't yet know what will come of it, but I just feel like playing around a bit, which is something fanfiction is far too convenient for to pass up the opportunity. So, let me know what you think and if you would be interested at all in a continuation of whatever it is I started here.

Also: I always use Jane as Hermione's middle name instead of the now canonical Jean. Back in the day, before Miss Rowling changed her mind, that's just what was commonly used in fanfiction and it stuck with me. Changing her name because Umbridge's middle name was Jane is just silly. You know, sometimes people share the same name – even nice and not so nice ones. It's a strange world.

* * *

**Hermione Granger's**

**Emotionally Disturbed Rationality**

~x~_**  
**_

**Preface**

**EDRD – An Introduction**

_3 September 2005_

My name is Hermione Jane Granger, soon to be sixteen years of age and officially attending my fifth year at the Hogwarts School of Bitchcraft and Bigotry, and I suffer from an emotionally disturbed rationality. Hence the title of this lovely, leather-bound book I bought in the most adorable little Elysium for the reading and writing kind in Florence, Italy, back in August during summer break. A book, mind you, that I sincerely hope will never be found and read by anyone but me, for reasons that I am certain will become quite obvious as soon as I come to whatever point I might or might not have intended this book for.

I can assure you that I have taken every precaution within the confines of my abilities to make sure this book will be the second best protected manuscript in Hogwarts after Professor Dumbledore's personal notes, which I feel is only adequate given the high probability that this will also be the second most embarrassing manuscript in Hogwarts after Professor Snape's diary. Oh my, now I'll really have to make sure this doesn't get into the wrong hands. Then again, I have the strong suspicion that might already be the case. What's gotten into me?

It's funny, though, isn't it? If I were still living as a Muggle right now, I'd probably just put all of this on one of those blogs and throw it right out there into the Internet for everyone to look at. Wouldn't that be silly? Look at me, look at me, I'm so interesting! Lucky for me, my current whereabouts couldn't be farther away from the Muggle world, and with the disturbing realm of the Internet as far away as humanly possible, I can do this the way it is supposed to be done: in private. Without exhibition; without narcissism in disguise; without receiving stupid comments on my personal affairs from the moron that is the average Internet user.

So, who am I talking to, you ask, and did I just, by any chance, call you a moron? That's a good question, I'll give you that. Could you possibly be one of the rare descendants of the smart lineage of our beloved species? Maybe one of the 90% who believe they are of above average intelligence? Wait, am I still talking to myself? No, of course I'm not. I'm talking to _you_, whoever you are. Now, you might just be my inner alter ego with whom I have chosen to converse for the purposes of these personal accounts of mine; after all, I need _someone_ to talk to. Doesn't everybody? But you could also be something else; something quite fancy, I dare say. You, my dear non-existent listener, could be… an idea.

Yes, you are the idea of someone, and not just anyone. In fact, you are the idea of _everyone_. Everyone who _would_ listen to me. Everyone who _would_ understand. Everyone who _would_ see a point in the existence of these ramblings. So I'm not talking to nobody or merely myself, I am talking to all of you; to the idea of all of you. Does that make sense or am I just going nuts, and does the one necessarily exclude the other?

Seriously though, I've got issues. Don't we all, you say, and rightly so. I'm not going to argue that. I do, however, presume to have somewhat uncommon issues, for I am in fact – simply put – insane. Now, if insanity were common, how much of its definition would really remain intact, and who would still care? Inevitably the smaller part of the world's exponentially increasing human population. Isn't the perception of insanity inextricably linked with the ratio in which it occurs? Its definition, it seems to me, is dependent on a contrasting point of reference. No person labeled as insane would ever authentically call themselves insane, which, the sane declare, is a symptom of their insanity (which, in turn, makes the sane look pretty suspicious, for they aren't calling themselves insane either). Or to quote Japanese movie director and cinema icon Akira Kurosawa: "In a mad world, only the mad are sane."

You'll obviously have noticed how I just contradicted myself; insofar as I cannot be insane by definition while still being capable of diagnosing myself with insanity (the world of mental illnesses truly is even more curious than the world of magic). So, okay: guilty as charged. I guess I'm not insane after all. But you know how the saying goes: don't count your dragons before they're hatched.

As I made clear right at the outset, though, I have – necessity begets ingenuity – found a label of my own for my condition. And that's even more fun than going through the countless checklists to find out how many psychiatric labels you qualify for.

And so I hereby solemnly declare: I exclusively suffer from Emotionally Disturbed Rationality Disorder, or EDRD in short (maybe someday there'll be a rock band of that name). I am officially the first specimen to be thus diagnosed, and I will herein chronicle my analysis of my condition over the course of the year. Now you might ask something along the lines of "What the heck is that crazy witch talking about?" and you would be right to do so. I will, in due time, elaborate further on my self-diagnosis, but for now, within the framework of this preface, let me illustrate the reasoning behind my chosen label for my condition with the juxtaposition of two simple facts:

1) I am not very fond of teenagers. I don't particularly like having to be one of them even though I'm obviously not one of them. I strongly dislike hormones. They are silly little things that solely serve to get on my nerves (which are a different kind of silly little things), and are pretty much all that teenagers consist of. I hate how they all start acting crazy at some point for no apparent reason. I just have to look at them and their obviously insane behavior and I instantly know why I cannot actually be crazy myself, because I am not like them. One day, they are all perfectly normal children with dreams, aims and ambitions, and the next day they are suddenly reduced to brainless transportation vessels for reproductive organs, generally referred to as teenagers. Now boys are all ogling all the damn time and girls are all giggling all the damn time; two phenomena I don't even want to begin to see a correlation between. Instead of homework, there's gossip at every corner. Everybody seems to have some obscure, ridiculous dirty secret all of a sudden, which everyone else seems to know about, kind of defeating the purpose if there ever was one to begin with. Their already limited vocabulary is apparently further reduced to terms such as kissing, snuggling, snogging, fondling, petting and shagging with random names of people, places and body parts thrown in between, and they constantly talk about some kind of bases, though I'm pretty sure bases are no part of Quidditch. I simply hate it all. It's a circus of idiocy. It's primitive. It's vulgar. It is, quite simply, beneath any truly rational being. I hate, hate, hate everything about it.

2) I'm in love with my best friend.

~xXx~

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**Author's Note:** I just realized - while reading a book that has nothing to do with this at all - that I've made the greatest blunder since Einstein's cosmological constant. Hermione in her fifth year at Hogwarts? September 1995, of course. Too bad I had already written the whole thing – jokes about the _Internet_ and _blogs _included – before thinking about when it would take place! While Internet and World Wide Web were certainly around at the time (the Mosaic-based Internet Explorer 1.0 was released in August 1995), the term "blog" wasn't even coined until 1999. One of the most prominent "blogs" in the early days went online in 1997 when it was still called a "zine". It was "The Misanthropic Bitch", and while I always imagined Hermione to be headstrong and non-conformist, I wouldn't exactly associate her with something _that_ crass. So in case you wondered: no, Hermione isn't supposed to be The Misanthropic Bitch.

Now, if only I could decide if I should a) take out the anachronistic passages (kinda like 'em), b) change the timeframe and therewith destroy the canonical space-time continuum, or c) just leave it the way it is, because the world couldn't care less.

**Author's Note 2:** I have pushed the timeline 10 years ahead relative to canon for now, to (mostly) avoid anachronisms. I don't yet know if the dates will be of any relevance to the story itself, but not only do they appropriately accompany the (non-)diary style, they also_ could_ be of implicit meaning later on; telling the reader how much time has passed between two entries, or if it's some kind of special date and whatnot. So for now, they are staying put.


	2. Simple Semantics

**Disclaimer:** Harry Potter belongs to James and Lily Potter (née Evans). I was in no way involved in the procedure of his creation.

**Footnote (standing upside-down): **I have no idea what I'm doing! How can people work like this? Writing and uploading a story chapter by chapter? This is madness! Madness, I tell you!

No, it's cool. I'm chill. Just stay with me. Keep breathing. It'll be alright.

Seriously (for a change), I have at least tried to come up with some kind of rough outline for where I want to take this, and I can proudly say that I have achieved no less than underwhelming semi-success, leaving generous room for the not so unlikely possibility that I will violently scrap the whole thing or at the very least completely rework it at some point. I'm just easy-going like that.

In the meantime, if you are at all willing to indulge me, here's what at least for now seems to be the first official chapter of this… thing. Have… fun, maybe?

Also, I cannot in good conscience make any promises about how (ir-)regularly I'll be able to update this. The required equation for that depends on variables I don't even know about. Mathematically, that's bad. Right now, it stands at something like this:

(motivation to do it + feedback from readers) * ability to bring order to chaos² inside head = maybe sometimes

* * *

**- I -**

**Simple Semantics**

_7 September 2005_

Or am I? It is such a simple statement, so quickly made and so easily accepted at face value by most people. When somebody declares he loves someone, what sane person would ever doubt them? Who would ever question the validity of that somehow intrinsically profound statement? And it's not even exclusive to politicians and religious fundamentalists. It works for anyone. You say it, so it must be true.

Here's a thought: that's bloody ridiculous!

Take my neighbour back in London for example: Mrs Spunkmeyer. If I were to spontaneously go over to her garden fence while she's tending to her petunias for the umpteenth time in a week and tell her that there is never a decrease of entropy in isolated systems, she would probably have no idea what the fudge I'm talking about, but since dear old Mrs Spunkmeyer isn't half as stupid as her name might imply, she wouldn't necessarily take the validity of my statement for granted. Well, she would, actually, since she's been my neighbour for my whole life and my semi-insanity is uncomfortably well known to her, but suppose for the argument's sake that I had chosen a better example – a person entirely unknown to myself – and pretend that Mrs Spunkmeyer, now meeting me for the first time, would instead raise an eyebrow at me and challenge me to prove my assumption, to cite my references, or at the very least to elaborate and explain. That's what people of reasonable intelligence – few and far between as they may be –, such as Mrs Spunkmeyer, do whenever somebody tells them something they have no way of verifying on the spot themselves. They don't just believe everything they're told.

Now imagine the same framework, petunias and all, but this time I don't tell her about that something that doesn't do something somewhere, and instead I simply make this announcement: "I'm in love with my best friend." Do you know what she would do? She'd congratulate me as if I had just won the Nobel Prize for being the most emotionally disturbed witch of my age! She'd smile and say, "I'm happy for you," or "That's so wonderful, darling." Yes, Mrs Spunkmeyer is a nice old lady, but at least in that specific reaction quite representative for about 99.9% of all people.

You know what I think? I argue this: declaring that you are in love is a far more dubious thing to claim than saying that entropy doesn't decrease in isolated systems, for the latter is an objective fact while the former is no more than a subjective assumption, questionable even on the level of semantics. In order to know if such a statement is true, one first has to establish what observable phenomenon the term _love_ actually describes, what being in love means and how one could possibly validate being in such a state. And after at least two and a half millennia of recorded elaboration and discussion of the topic, it can be safely said that the only conclusion reached so far is that there is no conclusive result at all.

So, if anything, things should be exactly the other way around. Somebody tells you something sciency? Might have to look it up, but in the meantime you might just shrug it off as long as you don't know any better. Ultimately, it's either wrong or right – if yet to be determined – and that's that. Beautiful in its simplicity. But somebody claims to be in love? Now that's truly a bold declaration and an invitation for scepticism and enquiry!

"Are you sure of that? How do you know that you're in love? What do you even mean by that? What's your evidence? Do you have any experimental data to support your thesis? Whose definition of love is your statement based on? Who do you profess to be in love with and what makes that specific subject of your alleged affection more likely to actually _be_ the subject of said affection than others? What do they have to say about it? And have you taken the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics into account, which, interpreted in a macrocosmic sense, basically states that you cannot, with equal precision, simultaneously know _that _you are in love and _what _exactly that means?"

I mean: love, the very word. Just look at those four letters. Isn't it outright crazy that pretty much every language in human history seems to have produced one such simple term to describe so utterly elusive a thing? No one really knows what it is, but everyone has a name for it. It's like a dog's name for which the appropriate dog hasn't been found yet, so in the meantime everything even remotely canine, from a Chihuahua to a Doberman, gets that very name. Come here, Love!

And how inflationary it gets flung around! It's outrageous! I wouldn't be surprised if _love_ were the fourth most used word in every Indo-European language after _I_, _me_ and _mine_ and their respective equivalents. In actuality, according to a list I found in the library last night, it seems to be ranked 387th in the English language; two whole places ahead of _money_ and one hundred behind _fish_. Now there's something to think about.

Anyway, what people proclaim their love for these days! They love their cars and their broomsticks. They love fame and money, even if apparently they love fish even more. They love sports, parties and strange noises they refer to as music. They love jewelry, shoes and their Prada backpacks. They love New York, dinosaurs and Jesus. They love the smell of napalm in the morning. Ron loves Butterbeer and the Chudley Cannons. Neville loves plants and green stuff. Fred and George love to laugh. Hagrid loves things nobody else loves. Luna loves things that don't exist. Draco Malfoy loves himself. Professor Snape loves to hate.

Now, I'm not dismissing the validity of their general feelings of affection or appreciation towards whatever they may be infatuated with, but… love, seriously? Suppose every statement about love made above is true: what in Merlin's name does _that_ make love? How can you describe your feelings for your parents and the fondness for material objects or your preference of some activities over others with one and the same word? Is it our language that's so inadequate for a more nuanced differentiation, or are human beings really that limited in the scope of their emotions?

And what about me? Well, I believe I can safely say that I _love_ my parents, my grandparents and my great uncle. Let's summarise that under the term _family_, encompassing five individuals. Though my great uncle Milton is insufferably grumpy about 30% of the time (that's equal to the time he's awake). Then there are the two best friends I ever had the great fortune to meet, and they are both male. Yeah, I'm a real maneater. Furthermore, I also love Hagrid like a favorite uncle (or a giant, living teddy bear) and, of course, Crookshanks. And then, well... there's literature. And science and nature. And music and art and poetry. And books as actual, physical objects. And there are some movies I really, really like as well, though I don't get to watch those for the greater part of every year for obvious reasons. Hogwarts is medieval like that. It's borderline offensive.

In my opinion, this might just call for a distinction between love and passions, as I prefer to call what others usually refer to as hobbies. But even if we were to accept that all of the above can be associated with the term _love_, I would nevertheless argue that there are different variants on more than one level at play here. For instance, I cannot possibly say that my love for my parents and for Crookshanks is the same. I could swear he just narrowed his eyes at me. But I'm not even talking about specific attributes, like intensity or value. They are just different forms of love, not intrinsically worth less or more.

But if there is such a multitude of versions of love, its definition will get no less flimsy – and at what point does it become impractical to collect so many different variants of something under the same term? That problem continuously arises in the nomenclatures of the sciences as well, but there the differentiation becomes relatively easy (if not immune to debate) – due to its objectivity – as soon as you have sufficient data. Except for Pluto, of course, who doesn't seem to be able to decide if he wants to be a planet, a dwarf planet or something else entirely. And don't even get me started on Biology. What's a whale shark again? A shark that apparently would much rather be a whale? A fish with an identity crisis?

Ugh. Where was I? Ron keeps bothering me with his Astronomy homework. I assume it truly must be hard to wrap your head around Kepler's third law when you are still under the impression that _Astronomy_ will help you foretell your own fortune, or lack thereof. There is always Divination for that kind of nonsense. Stop looking at what I'm writing, Harry. Thank you. I know I'm not being nice.

So… what is love? Now don't even think _Baby don't hurt me._ I can only hope you're not the kind of smart arse who says, "When you think you're in love, you're in love." Or his negative twin who retorts, "When you doubt if you're in love, you're not in love." I really don't believe things are that simple. Not where love is concerned, at any rate. I guess if there's anything at all I have illustrated verbosely up to this point, it's the fact that things aren't very simple for me. In case you don't believe me yet, I will elaborate on this further another time. Nothing about this situation is simple. You might have noticed how I haven't even directly talked about _him_ yet. That's because it's just so damn hard, which it shouldn't be, but… it is.

Seriously, how can you even be _in_ love with someone without them actually being there with you? You can love someone without them knowing about it, sure. You can even love someone who verifiably doesn't reciprocate your affection, no problems there. But in order to be _in_ love with someone – wherever exactly that's supposed to be – I really think they need to join you there,_ in_ love. Now, I don't claim to fully grasp the concept of love being something you can be _in _(let alone _fall_ into, like a trap or even a prank. Like, "Haha, you fell for him!" – "Sorry, I'm clumsy like that."), but accepting that to be the case one would also need to see it analogously to anything else you can be in, i.e. Paris.

You can't be in Paris with someone if they aren't there with you. If you're in Paris alone, you're just there. You're in Paris. Alone. And whoever you wanted to join you on the trip, but who for some reason or another didn't, can be happy for you from wherever it is they are currently at (or in). You can send them a postcard, letting them know you're in Paris, but if they don't like either Paris or you – and Paris is, as far as cities go, really quite nice –, chances are all the postcards in the world won't change their mind.

So, even if my dramaturgically sound punch line from the preface were true in a general sense of its meaning, which I cannot help but fear it is, it would nevertheless be more precise, in my opinion, to say that _I love the idea of being in love with my best friend_, because I love him; which, of course, doesn't do anything to improve my thereby uninfluenced situation whatsoever. I am, in a manner of speaking, waiting for him in Paris, yet the chances for him joining me there are infinitesimally slim, given the undeniable fact he doesn't even know I'm there.

Then again, I'm not even sure if I want to be in love at all, you know? Even without taking the specifics of my individual situation into account (hint: it sucks), I doubt being in love is an intrinsically desirable state. To make any kind of conclusive statement about that, I would of course first have to establish what exactly that means (I have quite a few relevant books left to read that I bought during summer), but when I look around me in the common room right now, or the corridors and hallways and classrooms during the day, and I see all these hormone-infested Zombies performing their vulgar mating rituals all day long, thinking _that _is what people call _love_, then I can at least assuredly say one thing about the whole affair: thanks, but no thanks. If that's love that's in the air around here, suffocation might be imminent.

The problem remaining, of course, that it's _my best friend_ who's at the causal epicentre of everything this is, whatever it is, and _we _certainly have never participated in any kind of mating ritual. I think. I hope.

Wait. Is that a good sign? Oh, I've never been this confused…

~xXx~

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**Author's Note:** I am, by the way, trying to write _britishy_. At the very least in so far as there are U's where there are no U's in North America, among other letters that somehow got either lost, misplaced or interchanged in the New World. Don't know how consistent I am in that endeavour (see?), but I try to look out for it while writing. I also believe the British prefer to keep their skeletons in their cupboards.


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